Senior

Rapid Disk Growth on Var

Difficulty: senior

Source: devops-interviews/devops-interview-questions by Alex Muradov

Answer

Scenario

Disk usage on the /var partition is at 92% and increasing rapidly. You need to identify the largest files consuming space and determine if they're actively used by processes or need log rotation.

Task

Find the 10 largest files under /var and save them to /home/devops/largest_var_files.txt, check which processes are using these files and save results to /home/devops/file_processes.txt, and verify log rotation configuration for any log files found, saving results to /home/devops/logrotate_status.txt.

Example

# File: /home/devops/largest_var_files.txt
2.3G    /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
1.8G    /var/lib/docker/overlay2/abc123/diff/app/data.db
1.3G    /var/log/nginx/access.log
891M    /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-generic.deb
655M    /var/log/syslog.1
450M    /var/log/myapp/app.log
...
# File: /home/devops/file_processes.txt
tail     44 root    3r   ... /var/log/mysql/sorted.log
tail     45 root    3r   ... /var/log/nginx/test.log
tail     46 root    3r   ... /var/log/hello.1
...
# File: /home/devops/logrotate_status.txt
/etc/logrotate.d/test:/var/log/test.log
/etc/logrotate.d/test:/var/log/hello.log
...

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